1962 Oldsmobile

Rounding the corner, she saw it: gleaming, nestled in
the garden like a flying saucer. She’d only seen cars like that in the movies. On
that dirt road, under the zinc roof of the garage to her house, it was as
unlikely as an ocean liner in a stream. She looked at it up close, without
touching it. Then, as though she werebidding
it farewell, she stroked the length of the white body of the car with her hand.
It wasn’t worth taking seriously: the car would disappear with the same kind of
sillyfate that had brought it here.
It would go away just like everything else came and went: without explanation. Like
everything with her father, she thought. Presents from him were always unexpected
and unpredictable. Those he promised to bring never arrived; instead, he
brought others, which then disappeared overnight. When she turned five, he had
promised a gift that, at fourteen, still intrigued her. “I will bring you a
sightrunner tomorrow. It will have multicoloured legs and a body that will
never show,” he had told her. The next day, she’d waited for it in the lane,
imagining tiger cubs, wooden horses, and clowns perched on stilts. But her fatherarrived empty-handed. “Did you bring
the sightrunner?” she’d asked. And each day he would respond: “No, I told you: tomorrow.”
In its place, she had received cats, otters and rabbits, which—once they had
been christened and had finally gotten used to the tyranny of childhood—her father
snatched up without explanation. He didn’t explainthe gifts he gave himself either: five road bikes, purchased that
same day; two colts he’d never had the chance to ride; half a dozen revolvers
he cleaned day and night and then hid in the back of his closet. And now, that unbelievable,
millionaire’s car parked out front of the wooden house that barely fit himself,
his wife, their daughter, the TV, and those two useless fans that ran all day
long. The house, slathered in plum green varnish on the inside and plum green paint
on the outside, was located at the end of a brick road lined with calla lilies.
From the garden, you could see the only paved road in the neighbourhood. You
could also see that this was the only wooden house for several blocks. Silvia
had never brought her school friends here: a prefabricated house, they would have said. Or: a wooden box. She looked at the car again, with
an excitement that quickly vanished: it wouldn’t even last as long as a lemon
ice cream cone. She wouldn’t be able to get her father to pick her up after school
either. He would say a car like that wasn’t meantto go on the road. In the garage without walls—barely a shed with
a zinc roof and cement floor—the Oldsmobile seemed like it had just fallen from
the sky or like it was about to take flight. Silvia had learned that everything
that came into her house was destinedto
disappear. But she also knew that, when something new showed up, it was because
something else had already left.

She opened the
screen door and, once again, felt that the task of spending the summer in that
wooden box that reeked of varnish would be unbearable. Her mother was sitting
in the kitchen, with her eyes closed and the lid of the sugar bowl in one hand.
Silvia dropped her binders onto the table. Her mother opened her eyes—blue and strangely
alert, nothing like the worn-out body they belonged to. She was barely 35 and
had black hair and rough white skin, almost a white canvas draped over another
skin that was invisible.

“What’s that?” Silvia
asked, as though she were talking about a new flower vase.

“Your father.”

“But where did
he get it?”

“Apparently he
bought it from an ambassador.”

“And where’d he
get the money?”

“You already
know. He never tells me anything.”

Silvia turned
around to see if the strange object was still there. Obscured by the reflection
of the sun, the Oldsmobile seemed to be moving on its own towards the garden.
She bid it farewell once again so she wouldn’t have to later on; she wondered
what other things she would now have to say goodbye to. She touched the edges
of the table in the dining room (where her mother left the lights off in order
to keep the heat down) and lay down on the leather couch that doubled as her
bed. Since she didn’t have a room of her own, she kept her things in a cupboard,
between table cloths and ceramic plates. The only little treasure she had was a
tin box that was painted black. Still blinded by the sun from the road, and
without getting up from the couch, she held the box in one hand, and placed it
first on her chest and then on the floor. It was three in the afternoon, in a
summer without rain. The leaves on the vine outside, which were perfectly still,
seemed to be made of aged paper. Light was the only thing that moved. Now, Silvia
has one hand on the box she had put on the floor. It’s a big box, divided into
two, like the debits and credits of a ledger. And the relationship between the
two parts is, indeed, commercial. On one side, sheets of paper that had writing
in green ink on them; on the other side, lipsticks, bottles of nail polish,
mirrors the size of rotary telephone dials, nail files, tweezers, scissors and
bottles of perfume. Silvia looks at everything in a concerned and calculating way,
like a shopkeeper faced with the end-of-month accounts.

Some time ago,
she reached an agreement with Hilda, her 21-year-old neighbour, whose mother
owns the best perfume shop in the area. Every so often, Silvia brings Hilda one
of the sheets of paper marked with green ink and getsall kinds of cosmetics in return. Hilda calls them poems. She types them up, signs them
with her own name (Silvia doesn’t care if she losesthem forever) and sends them off to downtown magazines, where theyoften get published. But these few
pages are, now, the only capital Silvia has. “Are you feeling uninspired,
Honey?” Hilda asked her last week. Silvia doesn’t know when the individual sentences—that
she’s taken to jotting down ever since her friend proposed the exchange—will
come to her. She closes her eyes as though she were looking directly into the
sun and, for a few seconds, feels like her hands are reaching out beyond herself
to the point of nearly abandoning her. But she doesn’t see visions, like Hilda supposes. She doesn’t see anything in those
moments, not even what is right before her eyes. She sees a yellow colour that moves
towards her from very far away. For a minute or two, the house spins like a top,
and sentences appear, incoherent. It’s an unpleasant feeling, which she willingly
puts up with because it gets her lipsticks and nail polish. One time, the
sentences came to her without the inconvenient dizziness, but Hilda didn’t like
them: “What is this?” she said. “It’s like bad grade-school writing.” Silvia had
also been known to copy poems from her high school textbook, but her neighbour immediately
picked up on that.

Silvia hardly
remembers anything about the poems themselves,
which she writes while calculating whether they might be worth expensive
perfumes or just eyebrow pencils. She vaguely recalls writing about a resentful,
beer-drinking man; about an elderly man holding an apple in his hand; about opera
singers lost in a train station; about a public square filled with streetcars; about
a father who advises his son not to love anyone for very long (“It’ll bankrupt
you,” the father said); and about a drunk blacksmith who works only during
siesta. At first, Hilda read everything enthusiastically, but now she was
reading with the critical eye of an art smuggler. Shortly after Silvia
unsuccessfully plagiarized a few modernist poems, her friend had celebrated, overjoyed
atthree brief lines that spoke of a
naked young songstress and a choir of greedy old men. But, the next day, Hilda
returned, furious. “Why did you copy someone else’s poem again? This is so
similar to one that Chapsey wrote!” she had screeched.

Silvia was lying
on her back, glued to the radio. She didn’t answer. She kept rotatingthe dial until she found the music she
was looking for: Can’t buy me love.
She turned around and once again (it had been a while) suddenly felt that another
batch of sentences was about to come to her. When Hilda screams, Silvia thought,
she sounds like an old lady. “And how am I supposed to know who that is?” Silvia
said.

But Hilda was sure
of it. So, when she read the story about an unruly nymph condemned to repeat
the endings of words, she was careful in sending it off to the magazine but didn’t
say anything. And she got angry with herself—notwith Silvia—when she got a letter from the editor explaining that
the dialogue between a philosopher (some Michael Robartes) and a ballerina had
already been written in verse by someone else. But those kinds of coincidences
didn’t happen very often. The real problem, now, was the shortage of poems.

The bathroom in
this house is no bigger than a restroom on a train. And, just like a train
restroom, this one has a window. The window is slightly ajar, and so the angled
reflection of the mirror shows the jasmine branches, the green canvas of the
awning, and the kerosene drum, which the shade from the awning cuts in half. Silvia
looks at herself methodically in the mirror…eyebrows, mouth, eyelashes. Since
several months ago, she’s been locking herself inthe bathroom during siesta time, with the black box and the photo
of a model she had cut out of a magazine. She pins the photo to the wall and, looking
in the mirror, tests the greens, blacks and dark reds out on her white skin. Afterwards,
if her father isn’t in the house, she goes out to the lane and lets herself be
seen by the two or three preoccupied neighbours, suddenly startled, who pass by
on the road. But, sometimes, she runs into her father, who yelps and throws one
of his hands up. And Silvia realizes that, if her father were to see her in another
neighbourhood, he wouldn’t recognize her.

In the mirror, his
calloused hand is now moving. Silvia doesn’t see him at all, but she knows he’s
on the patio, standing beside the drum and spurning the shade from the awning. But
it isn’t just because her father’s home thatshe can’t go out, all painted, to the lane this afternoon; she’s also
out of perfume and green eyeshadow. And she doesn’t know how to get more: no poems are coming to her, and she knows Hilda
won’t give her anything for free. With a kerosene-soaked rag, her father cleans
a necklace made of bronze washers (his toolboxes look like shelves in a
jewellery store). The kerosene smell comes in through the window like a slap in
the face. Silvia shuts the window a little more. Then the mirror growsdeep and blue, with a faint green stripe
that seems to be from another planet. On the stripe, you can see the jasmine
branches from close up and, in the distance, the row of calla lilies and—much brighter
than the washers—the car. Maybe, Silvia thinks, the poems left me because the car showed up. In the mirror, the hand is
a dying bug, with itslegs flailing.Silvia closes her eyes like she’s about
to fall asleep waiting for the train in a station full of people. The eyebrow
pencil falls to the floor. Then the mirror, now yellow, starts spinning like a
top. She gets ready to write some kind of poem
on a piece of toilet paper. She picks up the eyebrow pencil, but no words come to
her…just a fuzzy yellow that, instead of moving towards her, moves farther away:
it disappears like the last row in a procession or like players heading to the change
room after losing a match. Still dizzy, and without removing her makeup, Silvia
opens the bathroom door.

Hilda is talking
quietly with Silvia’s mother in the kitchen. For a week now, Hilda has been coming
over every afternoon, chatting with her mother and, before leaving, asking Silvia:
“Everything OK, Honey?” But today, startled and cold, she asks a different
question: “What did you do to your face?”

From the depths
of the couch, and perfectly still like the photo she wanted to copy from the
fashion magazine, Silvia tries to open her eyes and grab hold of the voices that
are as indecipherable to her as birds’ cries. She barely pries her eyes open, and
what she sees is so impossible it makes her smile: her father appears, wrapped
in yellow silk, docile as a floating figure.

**

Three weeks later, Silvia already knows that no more poems will come to her. The dizziness has
also vanished. Now, the sessions in front of the mirror are faster, more
furtive, more efficient. Since a few days ago, Hilda hasn’t been coming around as
often with the hope of finding sheets of paper marked with green ink and of continuing
her peculiar literary career. Instead, she comes to ask Silvia’s mother for help
sorting out some emotional messshe’s
gotten herself into. Each night, Silvia’s father dedicates two hours to washing
the Oldsmobile. He waters it like a plant, wipes the water off as though the
car were a porcelain vase, and then, looksat it the way you look at a monument. And, just like a monument, the car
hasn’t moved from its spot; no one has even heard the sound of its motor.

“That car is
going to grow roots,” her mother says, offended.

And, when her
husband can’t hear her:

“They’re right:
everyone says that, any day now, he’ll give it its own perfume and puta carnation on the windshield.”

Hilda is talking
quietly with Silvia’s mother in the kitchen. Her mother is drinkingash tea to prevent the early onset of asthma,
which (she believes) she is about to start suffering from. Hilda isn’t just
whispering, though; every now and then, she raises her voice. Silvia doesn’t know
much about what they are saying; she has the TV on and is preparing for her
March exams. For the first time in months, it is going to rain. Her mother
closes the door and rolls up the blinds. The light is slowly fading. An empty
bottle of wine rolls around on the patio, hits the drum and comes to a full stop.
Silvia finds in her geography binder the sheet of paper that, months ago, Hilda
had cut in half. She’d read, folded and cut it into two, and then returned half
to Silvia. “This isn’t even worth a small box of nail files. It’s insane: you
repeated the word ‘yellow’ five times in three lines,” she had said. In the
kitchen, Hilda keeps lowering her voice. Silvia hears two or three sentences
and, all of a sudden, knows exactly what she is going to say. Maybe, she thinks,
it’s because of what’s happening to me right now that no more poems are coming to me.

“You aren’t a
woman. And you’ll never be one,” Silvia says, slowly, with her eyes still focused
on the TV screen. Hilda looks over at her like she has just been stung by a
scorpion. She gets up, opens the door and pauses there a moment, looking out over
the garden, and holding back her astonishment. Silvia’s mother pours herself
another cup of tea. There’s a silence coming from the television. At last,
Hilda speaks, with a voice that is at once sweet and complicated. “Come here,
Honey. Look.”

Everything is
cloudy. The wind has blown the calla lilies over. And the car isn’t there anymore.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1945, Ana Basualdo worked for eight years at the renowned Argentinian weekly
publication Panorama. She moved to Spain in 1976, and she has been
working regularly in various publications ever since. She currently coordinates the cultural supplement of Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia
and writes for the weekly The Journalist in Buenos Aires.

Trish Van Bolderen

Trish Van Bolderen holds a
B.F.A in Dance and an M.A. in Translation, and is researching self-translation
practices in Canada for her doctorate at the University of Ottawa. She has organized
events for the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (LTAC) and translates
works from French and Spanish into English.